In Megadoc—a new documentary that chronicles the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis—author Sam Wasson explains what the movie’s about. Or, at least, he attempts to.

"Francis' vision was about not just changing the way movies are made, but changing the way we communicate," Wasson says, framed as a typical talking head. He appears pretty sure of himself; many people in Mike Figgis' new doc do not.

By most metrics, Coppola’s mission to transform both filmmaking and human communication was not successful. The theater-going business, unfortunately, wasn’t much affected by the iconic filmmaker’s self-financed passion project, and humans are still communicating as shittily as ever, despite Coppola launching a small, “interactive” Megalopolis roadshow that emphasized the need to “talk out” the world’s ills. 

I’ve written plenty on the movie before, fascinated by the huge shadow its $120-million budget cast, wholly put up by the revered creative scion himself, but Megadoc is saturated by that shadow. This is Francis’ money, and he is nothing if not an artist whose legacy is guaranteed, so every person on screen wrestles with an important, sometimes incredibly compromising question: What does Francis Ford Coppola want? 

Megadoc provides no answers, feebly suggesting that Coppola doesn’t know what he wants, he just wants the space and resources to figure it out.

“I know what I'm talking about…GIVE ME WHAT I WANT," he yells in the general direction of Shia LeBeouf (as Clodio Pulcher, the protagonist’s gross cousin), when blocking an especially inconsequential scene. “Don’t give me what I don’t want,” he later flatly says to the small group of Megalopolis’ department heads during an “emergency” visual effects meeting. First Assistant Director Mariela Comitini looks like she hasn’t slept in days, admitting, “Yeah, [the job involves] trying to anticipate what he wants, and you can’t. Nobody really can.”

That tension, between what he wants and what people are able to discern he wants, between his intentions and the reality of the film itself—between the deference he demands and his basic inability to communicate his ideas—comes alive in Megadoc. And, like any compelling making-of document—including Eleanor Coppola’s Hearts of Darkness (1991), about the harrowing filming of her husband’s Apocalypse Now (1979)—Megadoc provides a timeless portrait of an important artist’s benevolent, but hopelessly out-of-touch, megalomania.

Megadoc began alongside Megalopolis' production in November 2022 and wraps at the film’s 2024 Cannes premiere more than a year and a half later. For those who haven’t seen the feature, Figgis provides an efficient summary of Megalopolis' plot and characters, as well as a quick overview of how Coppola sold and/or leveraged more than one winery to pay for everything. 

To speedrun Coppola’s history with Megalopolis, Figgis reaches back to the early '70s, when Coppola first began conceptualizing the film. He weaves glimpses of past table reads and failed productions—VHS-grade footage of Robert DeNiro admitting he hadn’t read the script—with contemporary production struggles. A perpetually-canceled LeBeouf complains about how badly he needs this job before a scene of Ryan Gosling charming his way through the same role some 20 years earlier, contrasting two wildly different takes on the character.  

Figgis wisely focuses on the sometimes chasmlike gap between what Coppola wants and those desperately trying to figure out how to give him that, using the size of Coppola’s endeavor and the natural abundance of downtime on any film set to gather behind-the-scenes gold and candid talking heads fodder. All of it is prime moviemaking meat, the good stuff that Jon Voight—one of at least three glaze-eyed, zoned-out old white men on set—calls “drama.” 

LeBeouf and Coppola wrangle with a charged, dysfunctional working dynamic. Aubrey Plaza, playing conniving TV personality Wow Platinum, carries herself like a glowing, glowering Bette Davis on set, openly despising Coppola’s “nightmare” (as she calls Megalopolis early in Megadoc) and seemingly seeking to dominate all the sniveling goblins that are her co-stars. See: Dustin Hoffman (in the role of Nush Berman, barely in the movie), with whom Plaza insists on improvising a scene, practically setting up Hoffman to too easily make everything creepy.

Much of the pleasure of Megadoc is in the chaos it tries to synthesize. We catch crew members and department heads mid-work, in front of walls of drawings and specs, amongst clearly overstuffed creative spaces, harried and tired. Cast members in elaborate costumes fumble their grip on the material or try to pry some clarity from the director’s maundering—about philosophy and books he’s read and old movies—that makes the light behind their eyes go dead. 

Megadoc doesn’t do much to illuminate the big, bold ideas of Megalopolis, but it does illuminate the man behind those big, bold ideas, a man who’s arguably earned the right to get what he wants but has forgotten how to ask. If Megalopolis is a monument to delusion—the spectacular art of a man who hasn’t been poor in half a century, who believes that debate can crush class war—then Megadoc is an essential, endlessly entertaining celebration of that delusion. 

Megadoc opens at Regal Fox Tower 10, 846 SW Park,  Fri Sept 19, 107 minutes, NR.